Satan the Great Counterfeiter

With all of this in mind, dear friends, here is what we must understand when it
comes to the issue of man-made doctrines: Satan is the great counterfeiter. Satan
has a counterfeit for everything in God’s Word.

Satan has a counterfeit doctrine of the origin of the universe called evolution. Satan has a counterfeit doctrine of man called humanism. Satan has a counterfeit doctrine of sin called psychology. Satan has a counterfeit doctrine of Scripture called higher criticism. Satan has a counterfeit doctrine of Christ that Scripture calls antichrist – and Scripture says there are many antichrists through history as
well as the great personage of the Antichrist in the end times. Satan is constantly
flooding the marketplace, so to speak, with counterfeits.

One of the most clever and cunning things that Satan and Satan’s ministers will
do, is to claim to speak for God. From the very beginning, Satan has masqueraded
as the one who claims to speak for God.

In the Garden, when Satan tempted Eve, he began by questioning the Word of
God: “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?” But
Satan followed that question with a statement in which he claimed to speak for
God and to explain God’s mind. Satan gave Eve this lie: He said, “You shall not
surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it [the day that you eat of the
tree that God has forbidden] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God,
knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4-5) And so Satan tempted Eve into sin by
falsely claiming to speak for God.

Satan even had the audacity to do this when he tempted Christ in the
wilderness. Satan quoted Scripture to Jesus in his desperate but unsuccessful effort
to cause Jesus to sin.

Satan is the great Scripture-twister, and nowhere does Satan do this with more
subtlety and more cunning and more cleverness than in the church itself. Satan’s
ministers are great Scripture-twisters. As we are going to see in subsequent
messages, many man-made doctrines are invented by twisting Scripture –
perverting the true meaning of a passage of Scripture. What does Peter say about
false teachers, in Second Peter chapter three, verse sixteen? He says that they are
“untaught and unstable people who twist” the Scriptures “to their own destruction.”